PRESSED BETWEEN THE PAGES
DeAnn (Wolkow) Kruempel
Going from rags to something like riches
“Oh, no! I spilled!”
In my haste to slide the big bowl of potatoes across the table to Dad, I bumped my glass. Water flooded across the table, threatening the salt and pepper shakers and the toothpick dispenser.
Mom rushed to the rag drawer and returned with a thin, white T-shirt, complete with armpit holes. I tossed it to the center of the table to stop the river from Niagara-falling into the cracks between the leaves that extended the Formica table. Just in the nick of time!
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said as I mopped up the rest of the mess and glanced at our mother. She smiled her understanding smile that said we all spill sometimes.
That handy cleanup T-shirt, as well as the assortment of other well-used garments and other household fabrics that waited in the rag drawer, were used countless times to clean up spills, wash windows, dust furniture and scrub floors. The rag drawer was a classic example of the way people lived when we grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Nothing was wasted.
Clothes were worn, handed down to younger siblings, and patched until they graduated to the rag bag. On a cold Saturday, Mom would bring out the bag and we girls would sort, cut and save. We snipped buttons from old shirts and pajama tops.
We ripped zippers from jeans. Buttons and zippers were used again to prolong use of some other garment. When bath towels lost their toweling talents, we cut them into big squares, hemmed them with the Singer, and they continued their useful lives as dish rags.
Even heavy jeans and overalls got trimmed and saved. Sometimes they became rugs. One year, pressed between the pages of my mind, is a memory of Mom sewing bale aprons for the men, using heavy canvas and less-worn swatches of work clothes. Moving 80-pound bales from field to hay rack to stack took its toll on jeans. I don’t think jean-patching was Mom’s favorite activity!
Mother knew the best uses for every rag. Delmer recalls rubbing Vicks VapoRub on his congested chest and throat. Mom attached a thick wool rag to hold in the warmth. Amazingly, he felt better! Some thread-bare items transformed to box liners for baby pigs or sheep that needed a warm bed by the stove for a day or two.
Using what we had was a way of life. After all, why buy an item when you had something perfectly good at home? But manufacturers made people believe we needed something “better” — like the “quicker-picker-upper” and the germ-spread-fighter. Products began replacing those useful rags.
Likely, consumers enjoyed the conveniences. Some may have belittled the old-fashioned ways. Paper towels, rather than once-towels took over the mopping-up of spills. Rags went to the land-fill.
Something we might consider, as we tear 3 feet of absorbency from the roll: every year more than 18 million trees are cut down in North America just for paper towels. That averages at least 50,000 trees every single day. One ton of paper towels requires 17 trees and 20,000 gallons of water.
As a child, I don’t recall having even one roll of paper towels in the house. No. We used rags. Could be what we thought of as old rags were really riches all along.
The author’s column appears in a growing number of Midwest newspapers. Kruempel has compiled and published her column stories every year for the last five years.
She has also published a historical fiction series, “Promises to Keep.” Her 10 books are available on Amazon. Signed copies may be purchased at the Harrison County Welcome Center. Contact Kruempel at deannkruempelauthor@gmail.com.
